After a year of research and another of frenzied tinkering, Bloviation had produced a prototype of the Yotsa 7. The lenses were of a special quasicrystalline substance related to Icelandic spar, and the filigreed handle contained a state-of-the-art quantum computer full of qubit memristors. So what did the Yotsa 7 do? It revealed the deeper meanings of the objects in view.
The semiotic analyses were derived from artificially-intelligent image parsers, from social network statistics, and—this, too, had been Laura’s idea—from a specialized search engine that flipped through an exhaustive data base that held a century’s worth of digitized international comic strips in a peta-qubit quantum loop within the handle. According to Laura, the demotic medium of comics was a royal road into the depth
